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Author: joshua

One of the processes we have been playing with at Enspiral is how we set our collective strategy. A team of us ran the first Mastermind process to come up with our 2014 Enspiral strategy and we are just winding up our one for 2015. Teams within Enspiral are also picking up and adapting the process which is often a sign there is something in the idea.

I initially had a strong aversion to setting a formal strategy for the network, it seemed much more important to focus on our culture and let the direction emerge naturally from people’s actions. However, I’ve found that the process can be a strong culture building initiative in its own right and having a formal strategy gives people context when they are making decisions in Loomio and Cobudget.

I came to the conclusion that it is important to hold the strategy lightly and realise it is just a snapshot of the network’s intentions, but it’s better to have a snapshot than nothing.

The top level process is pretty straight forward.

Gather as much high level information as you can and consolidate into a digestible format to share with the whole group.

Focus on divergent thinking through individual and group processes to build up a list of possible strategic directions.

Look for common themes and build a consolidated list of possibilities, use dot voting to prioritise the most important.

Have a small group use this information to create a proposed strategy and run through a normal Loomio decision making process to finalise it.

But I also see it as just a baseline and that the true power of the process lies in future iterations. For example, at Dev Academy we are experimenting with a two step approach of

Individual Mastermind: each team member is invited to think about their personal strategy and direction for the year.Regular Mastermind: we collectively think about the team as a whole with the additional context of each person’s strategy and intentions.

I really like this adaptation as it doubles down on culture building and also builds a stronger personal reflection process. Personally, I found it really useful to sit down and think about where I should be heading and how best to communicate that with others. It was that process which led me to start blogging again.

I can imagine a truly fractal process where each team at Enspiral has a clearly articulated strategy which can provide context for our whole of network thinking. By having a similar name and process at different scales of organising we reduce the cognitive load for participants and we can also reduce the transaction costs for engaging by automating the information systems.

It also evokes the possibility of truly living strategies that respond to change in real time. At the moment a full network strategy is quite expensive in terms of engagement. Would it be possible to design processes so that the strategy evolved through lots of small alterations as the context changed? Could we build a strategy that is a real time reflection of our collective intent that mirrors a traditional swarm?

Currently we orient ourselves with information from other people’s actions and crude, somewhat outdated snapshots of our collective intent. That’s analogous to swallows bumping into each other to correct their individual paths using images their eyes collected 2 hours ago. What if instead we could orient ourselves based off the accurate, explicit intent of individuals and teams of all different sizes?

If we make forming, updating and sharing our strategic direction cheap enough and ubiquitous in an organisation I think we could unlock elegance that would make the swallows envious.

Here are some of the documents I’m working with if anyone feels like hacking on the process and I’d love to hear of any similar work going on.